Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

She was glad to be above it all, but she was hardly divorced from the case, her mind wandering back to the girl who called herself Candy and the awful nature of her death. The public outcry over the girl who was ignored her entire life was a little late in coming, she thought.

Still, there were other girls in the community to worry about, others who might fall prey to a terrifying predator in their midst. So the predator must be found and incarcerated or eliminated quickly. It was the predictable result of a mutilation murder; it sent a shock wave of horror through the system to discover that one so physically close had died in so brutal a scenario, with one's own community as backdrop. Now that Candy Copeland was dead, it seemed that she had gained the attention she so yearned for in life, that her murder had outraged people in the community, but that outrage failed to include an outrage against Wekosha, the outrage that Jessica felt.

Being literally above Wekosha, perhaps it was easy to judge, she decided. The jet made a pass over the city in a tight arc, the pilot having fun, coming to a southeasterly heading. The feeling for the moment was one of the plane's being like the archangel Gabriel, blowing a fiery horn across the land, screaming at the occupants of sleepy Wekosha.

She wondered momentarily if the killer lived in Wekosha or on its outskirts. She wondered if there would be more such horrible mutilations here, and if she and Otto would have to return. She prayed not.

Now that the plane was in flight, she lifted the newspapers which Boutine had slapped onto the table between them with the single command “Read,” before he busied himself on the jet's computer modem and fax machine. On the front page of a special, late edition of the Milwaukee Journal, she found a picture of herself and before and after pictures of the victim, the glaring headlines reading: “The Ice Woman Cometh” and “FBI's M.E. Is Woman of Steel.” All this according to the local authorities, some of whom were quoted directly, others indirectly. But how had they gotten her picture? Newspeople were adept at getting what they wanted, and this news foretold that they would soon know about the more grisly aspects of the crime. So far, they had not gotten this from either Stowell's people, Vaughn's or the medicine man, Stadtler. But it was only a matter of time.

She felt a little strange being characterized as a woman of steel with ice for blood just because she stood her ground and did her job. She knew that had she been a man, her demeanor and bearing at the crime scene would have been summed up differently, as professional and businesslike.

On the way to the airport from the inn, she had given a great deal of thought to the case and the part that she was now playing in it. It might be like a hundred other cases which went unsolved for years, if it were ever solved at all. Like Boutine, she didn't think the net the locals would cast out to drag in the lowlife of Wekosha was going to catch this killer. At the airport, her autopsy samples caught up with her, along with the crime-scene evidence from the evidence cage at the police department, the two couriers talking about the upcoming baseball season like old friends. Otto arrived soon after, antsy to get into the air and to learn anything new that she had as a result of the autopsy. She had told him that there was nothing new. She did so because she needed more time to think about what she had discovered; she needed to talk to J.T., to confirm her suspicions.

J.T. was John Thorpe, Jessica's second-in-command and her right arm at her Quantico laboratory. She placed complete trust in J.T. for handling medico-legal evidence. knowing that Thorpe treated it with the same reverence and care that she did. Their respect for each other was mutual, and even though John was several years her senior, he never allowed either her age or her sex to become a problem between them, unlike others under her auspices, such as Dr. Raynack, the old buzzard who once, in the heat of an argument he felt he must conduct in front of others, called her a scavenger. Behind her back, the name was still being used, and it was J.T. who made it an “acceptable” label when, on her birthday, he placed it on the cake which was shared by all in the department except Raynack.

J.T. had made a little speech over the cake, saying in his baritone voice, “We all know you're better than a bloodhound at the scene of a crime; that Sherlock Holmes would have to take a seat behind; that you don't accept anything on face value, or on the word of a man because he happens to have a Ph. D., an M.D. or even an M.E. back of his name”-a clear shot at Raynack-”or blindly accept letters printed on a death certificate. We know you leave nothing to chance or human error, that you are a methodical scavenger!”

She admired J.T. also because he had come up the hard way, a self-motivated orphan who had miraculously found the inner strength to set goals for himself and become a fine doctor, and then to continue on to become an M.E., when she herself had had so much help, encouragement and love from her parents and the example of her father.

Otto was suddenly standing over her with a drink in his hand, offering it to her. “Private stock,” he said.

She took it gratefully. He sat across from her once more as she sipped at the bourbon and water. He seemed to know her likes, and a moment's paranoia flitted in and out of her consciousness. Otto was very perceptive, and picking up on this, he said, “I asked your friend J.T. what you liked to drink. Saw to it we had some on board.”

“ That's a lot of trouble to go to.”

“ Not if it gets me what I want.” She smiled across at him, her eyes playing a game with his. “And what's that?” Her voice crackled with a sultry edge.

“ Some fast answers,” he replied. “Didn't the autopsy tell you anything new?”

She told him about the severed tendons, trying to put him off.

“ Anything else?”

She felt pressured. “It raised more questions than it answered. Lfet me put it that way.”

“ Then tell me about the questions it raised.”

She felt they were dancing in a circle now. She was first a scientist, and he knew this, so why couldn't he accept the fact that it would take time to investigate the minutiae of this murder. “Otto, I need to get back to my lab, need J.T.'s assistance, need time-”

“ Time is something we don't have a lot of, Jess.”

Her mouth fell open at the cryptic words. His eyes pulled from her as he laid out a stack of papers that'd come over the fax, black-and-white pictures and reports on earlier Tort 9s, the dark duplicate photos cascading across at her, photos of three other victims hanging in the air, upside down, just like Candy Copeland.

She carefully placed her now swirling drink onto the tabletop. It settled in the glass as she nervously fingered the edges of the additional information that Otto had offered.

“ You made me think I was in some holding pattern,” she said, staring at him now. “That this assignment was the next on docket, but it wasn't, was it?”

“ Some people didn't want you on it; I did.”

“ You knew it was the work of the same guy all along.”

“ I suspected, yes.”

“ Then why the charade?”

He leaned back into the cushion of his seat. “I didn't want you knowing, all right? I wanted someone with no prior knowledge, someone with a fresh eye, someone who had the expertise, and I didn't want a lot of judgments predicated on this!” He pointed to the materials lying between them.

“ Is that supposed to be an apology?”

“ I tell you where to go and when to go. I don't need to apologize or explain myself.”

“ You were hoping to get something from me to corroborate a theory or theories you're developing? Is that it?”